I think a country-specific community subboard is something that would help bigtime. I remember when I first found you guys how much of a pain it was to get product to Canada, and how bulk opportunities didnt exist until some fellow canadians explained thier meathods for getting around things. Even just broad catagories like: Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Ect. Would help a ton.
I think this is a good idea as things will inevitably be different among countries. Especially as we move to EU eventually.
Let’s do some brainstorming on how we can bring this to life.
Currently, North America shares the same products from a technological perspective so we don’t have to worry too much about any hardware/software differences (this will be different when we expand outside NA as the hardware will be different due to the shape of switches being different in other countries).
However, you’re right in that some sales may be different, or distribution channels are different, etc so what would be the best way to organize things?
Right now, the way we’ve structured it is to have Hub related questions as separate categories for our most popular hubs (ST, Hubitat, Home Assistant and Other). This, to my knowledge, shouldn’t change across countries as they all operate the same.
In addition, we have Inovelli news, wiring, suggestions and wiring, which shouldn’t vary too much.
I guess what we could do is something similar to how Hubitat’s forum is in that each person has their flag associated with their profile. And then utilize tags (which I need to get better at) and tag Canada or USA or something.
What are your thoughts?
One thing I don’t want to do is get the home page too cluttered as I already think 8 icons is excessive lol.
Sorry for taking so long to reply @Eric_Inovelli
Honestly this is the biggest factor, even as the market moves to the EU the software will be mostly the same, but the switch will be slightly different. I think this is why Smartthings still doesn’t have country specific forums since its not as required. (Much to some of our frustations).
This is the crux of the problem, how to add more topics, without getting cluttered. My first thoughts were a chat either on site, or on discord, but that defeats the point of a searchable forum. I then thought of something like extra reddit boards, but I imagine they will just get forgotten.
The only thing I can think of was asking what your plan if there was another hub that became popular? You would need another button anyways, so maybe it might work to have just a “Hubs” button which then prompts you to select your hub, then you can add things like a “regional” button. (At the same time I think it would also be good to add a corperate department category, so we can chat and bring ideas to specific people, rather than expecting all team members to be aware of all posts at all time incase they are needed, like a marketing, engineering or website thread)
I think that will be perfect in the meantime, with the ability to filter search results by country and potentially language!
Sorry I dont have more concrete to add, but I imagine other people might have ideas from other forums they have seen implemented effectively.
We just added the ability to add your country flag next to your name which I think is a good start: National Flags for Profiles
Another possibility would be to add sub-categories within each category.
For example, if you go to, “Suggestions & Wishlist”, you can select an additional sub-category to better organize things:
Maybe we could add country specific sub-categories (as well as a catch-all that is the default) and then make sure if you have a country specific post, it goes in that countries sub-category as well as tagged.
An example would be if a post is not country agnostic, it would go into the main category, but if it’s something Canadian specific, we’d file it under the Canadian sub-category.
Yeah, likely we’d add another button or throw it in the, “Other Hubs” if it still is #4 behind ST, Hubitat and Home Assistant. If it gets too crazy, then we could just have a category named, “Hubs” and then all the sub-categories would be the specific Hubs.
What do you mean by this? I think I understand and am aligned, I’m just curious!
I’ve always wondered about this – I’ve been to Xiaomi’s forum and it’s crazy bc it’s a Chinese company, but the forum is primarily English and I’ve seen it where people will start speaking another language and people will say, “English please”. I’m not suggesting this is right, I just found it interesting.
But, I am curious how to handle multiple language sections. How would we moderate it (I’m a classic American who knows only English lol)? I suppose once that happens, we’d hire someone who spoke that language as we’d need that for customer service anyway.
I thought this was an interesting read too.
Woot woot! It also was a great help in kicking my butt into gear to finish my profile lol
If a language gets popular and there are 50 posts in that language, is there a way to organize by language, then by problem?
At the same time, we are probably about to enter into the world of Consolation for the Smarthome Community, I don’t see any new hubs popping up that will be able to do things better than the Big 3. Winks users will merge with Smarthings, and hubitat and home assistant may end up becoming closer together over time. Securifi will proabaly always be a niche outlier for the DIYer
Well, one day the forum will be a busy place, so much so that you and your team wont have time to read every post. It might come a time that you create sub-forums for specific departments to have a place to directly interact with the community. To provide that one-on-one feeling with us, but allowing the ideas to be focused on the department it pertains to, as opposed to the who community.
Without getting political, Its kinda because Xiaomi has two faces, the International face and the Chinese face (https://www.xiaomi.cn/). The CCP doesn’t really like forums anymore, so the community exists more across on other sites in Mainland China (I believe). The International side markets to USA, EU and many other countries and has regional specific forums because of its smartphone community, but for the most part thier smarthome community exists more on reddit than on thier forum. (Correct me if I’m wrong)
Ill read it tomorrow!
This was a great idea, it seems like it would make it easier if there was an option to choose your preferred hub as well.
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@Eric_Inovelli I second this
I agree 100%, super helpful – Let me see what I can do!